Rogue Planet Review

Gorgeous turn-based strategy for the iPhone.

Gamers that fell hard for Nintendo's Advance Wars strategy series are the exact audience Gameloft seeks with Rogue Planet, a brand-new turn-based sci-fi strategy game for the iPhone. Developed by Agharta Studio, Rogue Planet benefits not only from a wealth of maps and missions, but also from impeccable art. All that's really missing from the package is online multiplayer, but Gameloft says that will be addressed in a forthcoming update.

Rogue Planet begins with the ship Nimah returning to Earth after a 35-year-long colonial mission across the stars. As the Nimah approaches, the crew notices that there are no city lights on the dark half of the planet. Something is dreadfully amiss. The ship decides to land anyway to investigate and before long, the crew (made up of some great characters like the heroic Clyde and Violet) discover that once again, man screwed up big-time by developing sentient robots. As artificial intelligence is wont to do, it got out of control and went to war against humanity.

The flow of the real-time strategy scenes on the surface should feel instantly familiar to genre fans. Tapping battlefield units brings up movement and attack options. The farther into Rogue Planet you get, the more units you have at your disposal with specialties in infantry, artillery, etc. The tap controls are quite accurate, although I wish there was an easy, obvious button for undoing an action midstream. Sometimes you make mistakes and it would be nice to have a way to undo them before committing to the turn. However, the battle scenes unfold sensibly. You can easily see the strengths of your units so you can best direct them across the field, using terrain changes to your advantage. When two units clash, the game instantly goes to a side-by-side view of the battle where the result is out of your hands. Unit leaders also have special powers. Being lead by Clyde, for example, adds 10-percent damage to all units.

Rogue Planet's battle scenes are quite detailed.

I have two main complaints about the battle scenes. One is that Rogue Planet does nothing to advance the ball. It sticks within the boundaries of the genre. Since it delivers so well on the basics it's hard to get too bent out of shape, but after playing so many turn-based strategy games on the iPhone (Uniwar, Reign of Swords, etc.) it would be great to see one try something wild.

The other complaint is that Rogue Planet's pacing is a bit rough. The first mission on the surface is just boring and does not bode well for the rest of the game – there's no combat, just exploration. Why wouldn't you start with a bang? The dry spell is mercifully short, but then the game gets quite difficult within just a few missions. Agharta understands that experienced genre fans are the likely audience, but where's the learning curve for those that haven't plugged hours into Advance Wars or Military Madness? I suppose one could practice with the easiest setting in quick play, but my heart goes out to the newcomer that tries Rogue Planet and just gets hammered.

Between battle scenes, you move the narrative (which is excellent) forward by talking to the crew of the Nimah. By sliding from room to room, you learn more about the personalities onboard as well as what happened to Earth. These narrative scenes are crisp and enjoyable. The art in them is exemplary. (The art in the battle scenes when two units clash is also good, but the character design in Rogue Planet is easily its strongest aesthetic.) The music is also uniformly good – real space opera stuff that lays it on thick with synthesizers. This would be fun music to have on the iPod side of the iPhone.

Rogue Planet was reviewed with version 1.0.

The Verdict

Despite not taking any risks, Rogue Planet is still a good -- and challenging -- strategy game for the iPhone. Not only is the campaign long, but you also get a quick play mode where you can select between two armies and try out extra maps. (Hey, Command & Conquer: Red Alert -- take notes.) The art and music are truly high points of Rogue Planet – it really is an exquisite game to look at and listen to. I’m looking forward to the online multiplayer in the incoming update; but even without it, Rogue Planet is still worth the admission price to strategy fans.